3 Reasons Why Startups Should Have SEX

Is your startup having SEX? Yes, that’s right. SEX.

Because if it’s not, odds are that your competitors are. That means there’s a lot at stake if you aren’t engaging yourself in this activity of making love. (and money)

And this isn’t a click-bait title to get your attention, we’re actually going to talk about SEX here. Startups and SEX.

Before you get worked up, let me introduce myself and our startup.

I’m Tonmoy Goswami and we’re building Storypick – a shortform viral content destination. I had this wonderful opportunity to share my humble learning in front of a packed audience at the Mumbai Open House. 

And yeah, witness the awesomeness of Ashwin Sanghi. 🙂 

Here’s a summary of my talk (in case you don’t want to watch the video recording of a thin bearded man who resembles someone from the movie 300 (Alok said that))

1. Let’s begin with S: Supporting your smaller competitors

Once other notice your success (initial traction), there’ll always be people trying to emulate your idea. So you’ll have to educate them, give them enough info to get them on their feet and get things rolling. After that the magic happens. If you want to stay lean, you’ll have to empower your smaller competitors. Why?

Because once they’ll start building something, they would come up with small things you and your team would have never thought of or have missed it.

E.g. in our (Storypick) case they can come up with content, YouTube videos and ideas that we couldn’t in a 24 hour time span. So it’s like having an extra army of people at your disposal working for you. Only unpaid.

2. E: stands for Emotion

The great philosopher Aristotle claimed that to persuade, one must employ three types of argument: ethical appeal (ethos), emotional appeal (pathos), and logical appeal (logos).

Ethical appeal – is the one who’s trying to persuade. You. Are you credible? Can you be trusted? What’s the credibility of the seller/speaker/startup/product

Logical appeal – speaks to the brain. data and numbers, stats and evidence

Emotional appeal – stimulating feeling of pain or pleasure

Ok, but what does it mean and how to apply this? Please refer to Slide 5 in the ppt below:

The Four Organs of Communication:

When you take a person, the four organs are. From the top:

The head – Analytical appeal

The heart – Place for passion. Love, emotion, sentiment, drama resides here.

The gut – Triggers humour and instinct. Long way from the analytic brain. Impulsive, spontaneous, just do it, risk prone.

The groin – At the bottom is the groin. There’s no logic in these organs. They are far far away from the head.

The secret is: you should always communicate bottom-up.

3. X: is the shortest distance between two users

Suppose you have an app, Alok downloads the app because you’re his friend. Now Alok has many friends online. To reach them you’ll have to empower Alok by making it super easy for him to share this newly-found awesome app with his friends. That’s X. That’s the digital equivalent of word-to-mouth publicity.

How to do it?

Maybe a button, maybe an incentive. I don’t know how. But do it. E.g. Taxi aggregators make it super easy for you to refer their app to your friends. They’ve incentivized it; you get free riding credits. That’s word of mouth.

Watch my humble attempt at sharing these learning at the Rodinhood Mumbai Open House.

Now you know S E and X. Now you can go home and have sex…..with your startup.

After you’re done, let’s connect. Ping me anytime on

Twitter at @7ONMOY

Facebook at tonmoy.goswami